Total War Battles™: SHOGUN, this year’s hit real-time strategy game for mobile, is now available on Steam for PC and Mac. Total War Battles™: SHOGUN delivers quick-fire, tactical combat balanced with strategic building and unit management. All set in a beautifully illustrated Medieval Japan.

About This Game

Total War Battles™: SHOGUN, this year’s hit real-time strategy game for mobile, is now available on Steam for PC and Mac.

Total War Battles™: SHOGUN delivers quick-fire, tactical combat balanced with strategic building and unit management. All set in a beautifully illustrated Medieval Japan.

Key Features:

THE COMPLETE AND ENHANCED TOTAL WAR BATTLE EXPERIENCE

Total War Battles: SHOGUN on Steam is the most complete and up-to-date version of the game. Including enhanced visuals such as anti-aliasing, improved shadows and additional lighting effects. Plus a broader overview of mission-maps, all the better to plan your genious strategies.

Total War Battles™: SHOGUN on Steam also includes Steam-specific features, such as Achievements and leaderboard rankings.

As an additional bonus, on purchase the game also automatically unlocks the Sendai Faction Pack for use in Total War: Shogun 2 – Fall Of The Samurai.

COMPETE FOR THE SUPREMACY OF MEDIEVAL JAPAN

Lead your clan to battle through more than 10 hours of story-driven campaign set in the world of Total War™; winner of “Best Strategy Game of 2011” awards from Gamespot, IGN, Gamespy and GameTrailers.

BUILD YOUR ECONOMY & YOUR WAR MACHINE

Deploy and manage your bases to generate resources and recruit units including samurai, archers, ninjas and cavalry. Each victory awards XP to spend on building and troop upgrades that will make a decisive difference to your future battles.

A UNIQUE TAKE ON REAL-TIME BATTLES

Total War Battles™: SHOGUN introduces a new real-time battle system that feels both familiar and fresh. The hex-based battle map allows for quick and simple unit movements that lead to deep and cunning strategies. However, as followers of the “Bushido” code of conduct, your units can never turn back – this twist to classic RTS gameplay adds tension and intensity to the action, making each victory even more rewarding.

SKIRMISH MODE

Play through six standalone battles in Normal, Hard or Shogun difficulty. Compete against other players on the leaderboards and unlock new Skirmish achievements.

STRATEGY FOR ALL

Total War™ fans will naturally enjoy the intense, deep and rewarding action-strategy gameplay, while more casual strategy fans will appreciate the Zen simplicity of the tutorial battles, scalable difficulty level and hint system that will soon make them a tactical master.

Total Wars Battles: Shogun left one hell of a bad taste in my mouth. This is my first entry into the Total Wars franchise and oh god it was so boring. I sat there, waiting and waiting for my extremely slow resources and cooldowns just to see the most minimal action where this game is a slow tug-of-war style game. The story itself was also so forgettable. You were invaded, you want revenge, you get revenge, then some other dude comes in and wants to fight you. That is it. It really is just not worth the time, I’m sorry.

It's hard not to feel a little sorry for The Creative Assembly. Whilst virtually every developer in existence has committed serious time towards mobile spin-offs to their intellectual property on Android, iOS or Facebook, the chaps from Sussex have just about the worst possible product to migrate away from the PC.The Total War series is so vast in scope, and so demanding in execution that current-gen consoles can't even deal with the thousands of units, sprawling maps and graphics, never mind mobile hardware. So it's little wonder that the iOS version of Total War Battles: Shogun is an extremely uncomplicated hex-based battle-brawling time-waster, and that the Steam version really isn't much different.Campaign mode, doubling as a tutorial, gradually steps players through the placement of basic units and support buildings. There's no surprises in the rock/paper/scissors unit matchups, and the placement of unit manufacturing plants such as the lumber yard, blacksmith and barracks all adhere to fairly well-regulated rules. Naturally, the main goal is to advance a warring clan through an overarching plot involving deceased parents, betrayal and Japanese-accented cameos, but it all manages to hold together well enough provide an impetus to continue.Once the campaign has been mastered, players can move on to a skirmish mode whereby the lessons learned previously are used to good effect against the AI. Various objectives must be met in order to succeed, such as placing a certain type or quantity of support buildings, or merely massacring the enemy in a particular fashion. Three difficulty levels – normal, hard, or Shogun – keep the combat varied and, at times, extremely difficult. The developer has stated that this PC version will be harder than the iOS example, no doubt looking to capitalise on the wider aspect ratio and faster method of control.The latter, unfortunately, is probably where the game suffers most. PC gamers are used to having console titles ported over to their native platform with barely a pause to carefully optimise the input for keyboard and mouse. That developers have been guilty of immense laziness in this area goes without saying. But in the case of Total War Battles: Shogun, PC gamers are faced with an ignominious twist on the formula – a mobile title ported to the PC, with the same scant regard to input. Instead of horrendous latency and "Press X to continue", it's a matter of putting up with a lack of hover-over tool tips, forcing players to hold down the left mouse button for a couple of seconds to get a description of the unit or building in question. Touch screen users obviously have no ability to use such tool tips, but mouse-wielding gamers certainly do, and it's hard to imagine that these would have been particularly difficult to incorporate.After a protracted start spent working around this issue however, both the campaign and skirmish modes open up into a welcome challenge, with a fairly steady resource-gathering, unit-producing metric ably keeping up with the introduction of new unit types and strategies. Thanks to the Japanese laws of Bushido, units aren't permitted to reverse direction in any way, meaning that the unit limit can be reached quickly when units move too far forward to be useful.The unit animations are hardly likely to set the world on fire, but that's not really the point. Total War Battles: Shogun may have very little in common with its hugely respected relatives back in the Total War stable, but it represents a cheap foray into a new market for the team at The Creative Assembly, and there's nothing wrong with that at all.